


time is an ocean (variations on the color red)

by chrundletheokay



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Abusive Parents, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Blood, Gen, PTSD, References to past CSA, Self-Harm, honestly this is depressing, i can only hope that the writing makes up for how truly depressing this is, rating just to be safe bc of potentially triggering content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-08 04:50:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17974799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrundletheokay/pseuds/chrundletheokay
Summary: "You are not like your sister, Dennis Reynolds," his mother snapped at him.(Dennis has never been able to reconcile the way their mother loved him with the way she hated Dee. And he's never been able to reconcile the idealized version of her he holds in his mind with the real one he'd had as a kid, when he'd needed her the most.)





	time is an ocean (variations on the color red)

**Author's Note:**

> [TW: depictions of self-harm and blood. references to childhood sexual abuse, parental abuse and neglect, and eating disorders. one brief reference to past suicidal ideation.]
> 
> [seriously, big trigger warning for the self-harm. I tried not to describe the actual act of self-harm in depth, but it's a major theme throughout. as is blood.]

It’s the same shade of red as the lipstick Dennis impulsively purchased on a recent trip to Sephora.

The same red as that shitty car Dee bought the day they planned to ditch her to drive to the Grand Canyon — that ill-fated vacation in which they accomplished nothing beyond irrefutably demonstrating the validity of Murphy’s Law.

And yes, this particular droplet of blood is nearly the same red as the dress Dee wore to a holiday party when they were thirteen, and their mother sneered and said Dee looked like an oversized cherry tomato, trellis and all.

_Oh, please, Deandra. Grow up,_ their mother snapped, when Dee burst into tears. _If your own mother can’t be honest with you, who can?_

Dennis led her into the guest bathroom and handed her a tissue box, and quietly said, _I think you look like a princess._

While she cried and sniffled, he French braided her hair the way he watched Josefina do for Dee, who couldn’t do her own hair in the back brace. As he braided, he reflected that perhaps the back brace wasn’t a tomato trellis, but more like the towers that princesses get locked up in. One day, Dee would escape and be a famous actress, and Dennis would be a famous veterinarian. They would be rich and live next door to each other in mansions, and have lots of friends, and throw lots of parties. Dee could own as many ugly cherry-red-tomato princess dresses as she wanted, and anyone who talked shit could get the hell out of their mansions.

When Dee dried all her tears, she reapplied her cherry chapstick from the pinkish-red tube and put her game face on again. They then went back out into the party and drank sodas and stuck close together, elbow to elbow the rest of the night.

And once he spotted their mother nearby, Dennis turned to the closest person, some ugly old lady that probably worked with their dad. And he said, loud enough for their mother to overhear, _hey, isn’t my sister’s dress really pretty?_

If Dee were to see Dennis’s stupid fucking horrible psychiatrist, if she were to tell Dr Coleman about memories like this, Dr Coleman would probably tell her the same thing he told Dennis at their appointment this morning: that confronting her trauma would help her to move forward in her "recovery process."

“ _Her_ trauma.” What a load of bullshit. Like trauma is a thing that Dee has to own. A thing that people did to her, and now it belongs to her, whether she likes it or not, whether she believes it’s there or not. It’s _her_ trauma now; therefore, it’s _her_ responsibility to take ownership of it, to clean up the messes other people made in her brain.

It’s infuriating, but he barely feels the anger any more. Closed safely in the confined quarters of his bathroom, razor blade balanced lightly in one hand, thoughts of his morning session begin to slip away like so many childhood memories.

Dennis has been taking a lot of aspirin lately. Aspirin for hangovers, aspirin for headaches, for backaches, for muscle pain. Aspirin is a blood thinner, he realizes, as he watches the thin droplets of blood run easily down his forearm. Maybe that’s why it’s bleeding more than he remembered it doing when he was fourteen and used to do this.

He remembers being fourteen, and having a series of small red cuts on his inner thighs, across his hipbones, his stomach — anywhere _mommy_ wouldn’t see, because _You are_ not _like your sister, Dennis Reynolds. You will not carve into yourself like a prize fucking ham_. _I won’t allow it._

Dr. Coleman was wrong: Dennis doesn’t have trauma, and he absolutely does not have PTSD.

Charlie has trauma, and he almost certainly has PTSD as a result. But Dennis doesn’t like to think about that, about the trauma, about what happened to Charlie. No, about what Jack Kelly _did_ to Charlie, because it didn’t just _happen_. Every time it comes up — which admittedly isn’t often — it’s like a tight fist closing around Dennis’s throat, waves of panic washing up in his gut. A thousand fire ants crawling under his skin. The only way to make the feeling go away is to drink hard liquor, or change the subject, or brush it off with a joke he absolutely hates himself for making later.

Dee has trauma, too, but it isn’t like Charlie’s. And Dee used to cut, too; she started before Dennis did. When their mother found out about Dee, she slapped her, like Dee wasn’t hurting herself enough. Like _their mother_ wasn’t hurting Dee enough already.

Dennis found out about it before their mother, before anyone else, by reading his sister’s diary. _Nobody likes me,_ her most recent entry said that fall afternoon. _Even my own mom doesn’t like me. Sometimes I think I’d be better off dead._ Tucked inside the cover of the journal were several rusty razor blades.

That evening, closed away in Dee’s bedroom, working side-by-side on their homework, Dennis spotted the tidy, parallel cat scratches across her thin, pale wrist.

Dee wasn’t wrong about their mother, but he didn’t tell her that. Not that day, anyway.

Instead, he told her: _You shouldn’t do that, you know._ And it scared him that he couldn’t think of a good reason why she shouldn’t.

It didn’t matter, though, because Dee brushed him off: _I didn’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about._ But she did, because she started wearing long sleeves after that.

Dennis was their mother’s favorite, but their mother never liked Dee. _You are not like your sister,_ indeed.

He has never been able to reconcile the way their mother loved him with the way she hated Dee. It wasn’t until he read about emotional and verbal abuse in a psych class at Penn that he realized with a sick jolt of fear: maybe Dee wasn’t just a bad kid all those years. He spent the entire night pacing around the frat house, fighting off panic attack after panic attack.

_Do you think mom is abusive?_ he asked the next time he saw Dee. She burst into laughter, hysterical tears running mascara streaks down her cheeks.

_Are you serious?_ Dee howled as she cackled and cackled. _Of course she is!_

Nearly two decades later, he still can’t reconcile that knowledge with the mental image of a mother who loved him.

And he still can’t reconcile the idealized version in his mind with the reality of the mother he’d had at fourteen, when perhaps he’d needed a mother the most. He can’t hold those two concepts in his mind at the same time — his memory of a perfect mother, versus the mother who responded with repulsion at his halting and terrified attempt to tell her about the incident with the librarian. He’d stammered out a vague, roundabout explanation, unsure of the right words for what had happened. His mother scrunched her face up in obvious disgust, turned, and walked away without saying a word.

He called after her, but she ignored him and went to the kitchen for a drink instead.

She didn’t acknowledge him for a week afterward, until he muttered a vague apology for _upsetting her_.

_I have no idea what you’re talking about, Dennis_ , she said, her voice sharp and high-pitched. But it was the first thing she’d said to him in a week, so _of course_ she knew. How could she forget? So the message was clear: _you’re not to speak of this again._

He didn’t, and he was her favorite once more.

Until she found the bright red cuts across his forearms, that is. _You are not like your sister, Dennis Reynolds_ , she snapped. _You will not carve into yourself like a prize fucking ham. I won’t allow it._

After that, he learned to hide it.

The message replayed in his head every time he cut, but he didn’t stop. He cut back _(cut back on cutting_ — the irony wasn’t lost on him) when he started dieting around fifteen years old. Instead of keeping track of bad days through marks on his skin, he did it with diet plans and calorie counts and weight logs in a small red journal. Red, not just the color of blood, but also of power, pain, and perseverance. Red, the color of the little marker on the scale in his mother’s bathroom, tracking his place in the world as the dial spun ever lower.

His mother used to wear bright red lipstick, not unlike the kind he just bought for himself. Bright red, but other colors, too: a deep maroon red, and copper with red undertones, and even bright pink sometimes. He’d sneak into her bedroom when she was gone, and he’d dig through her vanity drawers, uncapping palettes of soft powdered eyeshadow and blush, gently opening lipstick tubes and gazing in awe at the smooth waxy pigments. Once, when he was sixteen, Josefina caught him trying on a bright red shade, and he’d blushed just as furiously red as the lipstick.

_I don’t think it’s your color, Mister Dennis,_ she said with a gentle smile. _You better get out of here before Mrs. Reynolds comes home. She won’t like you playing with her things._

As far as he was concerned, it was a kindness on Josefina’s part, the sort his mother would never show him, were she to find him like this. After all, Josefina knew as well as he did that Mrs. Reynold’s objections would not be with the particular lipstick shade he’d chosen. And her anger would extend far beyond Dennis trespassing in her bedroom and touching her belongings.

So he smeared off the product across the back of his hand, and ducked out of the room, around Josefina. Back in the safety of his own bedroom, in his own bathroom, he washed off the rest of the lipstick and wiped it off onto a bath towel. The navy blue terry cloth was dark enough to hide any faint traces of lipstick left behind, just as it was dark enough to hide any bloodstains accidentally left behind from self-inflicted wounds.

Dennis is in his forties now; he hasn’t done this at all in years, hasn’t done it regularly since college. And yet here he is, grateful once more for dark-colored bath towels, his all-inclusive first aid kit, and a closet full of long-sleeve button-up shirts.

Except now he doesn’t have a mother to hide it from. That, too, is still occasionally hard to make sense of, to fully integrate into his reality. Dee had been glad, for the most part, when their mother died. But Dennis Reynolds is _not like his sister._

His mother’s voice is suddenly so real, but faint. Actually, it sounds uncannily like Mac’s voice, echoing his name: _Dennis._

_Dennis._

“Dennis? Dude, are you home?”

It _is_ Mac — not a memory, but here in their apartment. Now.

There’s a knock at the bathroom door.  “Dennis,” Mac says through the door. “Are you in there? I’ve been calling you for hours.”

Dennis opens his mouth to respond, but no sound emerges.

Mac knocks again. “Hey, dude, are you okay in there?”

He should move. He should lock the door. He should cover up his bleeding arm. He should clean up the blood on the floor, the blood on his shirtsleeve, the blood on his hands. He should hide the razor blade. But first and foremost, he _really_ should lock the—

The door opens. _“Oh,_ Jesus Christ,” Mac wheezes.

He sounds like he’s about to pass out, and Dennis remembers faintly that he’s always been squeamish about blood.

Mac crouches down on the floor in front of him, anyway. His sleeveless t-shirt is gray, with the name of a bar spelled out in big red lettering across the chest. It used to belong to Dennis, in a former life. He stares at the logo and blinks dully.

“Give me the razor, okay?” Mac says gently.

He doesn’t move, but Mac slips the blade carefully from his hands and flushes it down the toilet. That doesn’t seem like something one should do.

The clatter and noise of Mac rummaging through the cabinets and drawers echoes over the cold white surfaces of the bathroom, and throughout the cold white expanse of Dennis’s empty skull.

“We need to stop the bleeding, okay?” Dennis can’t remember seeing Mac around kids in ages, but he imagines this is how Mac might talk to one, if he wanted to be nice, instead of yelling and threatening. “Is it okay if I touch? I’m just gonna put pressure.”

It isn’t, although it wouldn’t be the worst thing ever to happen to him, he supposes. He closes his eyes, and Mac takes that as agreement on Dennis’s part.

Dennis detaches and floats away inside of his own skull for a while.

“You have to press kinda hard,” Mac explains as he presses a towel to Dennis’s forearm and grips on tight. Dennis barely feels it. “It makes the blood cells all clump together, so they can’t fit through the cut.”

That’s absolutely not how coagulation works, but Dennis doesn’t have it in him to argue.

Mac continues to jabber on as he applies pressure to the wound, and subsequently works to disinfect and bandage it up. Dennis checks in periodically, but the content of Mac’s monologue is nothing unusual or worth sticking around for. It’s just the usual talking points that come up when Mac thinks Dennis is Freaking Out: Repeated recitations of the date, month, and year (or as close to it as Mac is able to guess at any given time). Reassurances that Dennis is okay and is safe. Lies telling him that everything is okay, and everything is going to be alright. That sort of thing.

Mac’s hands eventually still over Dennis's left forearm. “There,” he announces, quiet and reassuring. “All set.”

Dennis blinks his eyes open to find Mac’s brown eyes looking back at him. They’re big and sad and droopy, and the lashes clump together slightly with what must have been tears, so Dennis averts his eyes again.

There really isn’t much blood on the floor. Barely any, in fact.

“Rough day, huh?” Mac asks. He’s going for levity, really forcing it, but his voice is ever so slightly hoarse with the strain of it all.

Dennis tries to let loose what he thinks will be a bitter laugh, but it escapes the back of his throat dry and haggard, rather like a sob. Except he’s not crying, and he won’t. He can’t. He refuses to. He’s not allowed.

If he remembered how to speak, the words that would come out of his mouth would include the phrase _understatement of the fucking century._

“I haven’t seen you do that in ages,” Mac says, low and almost sad. “I take it your appointment didn’t go real good?”

Another understatement. Dennis nods slightly in agreement.

“I’ve been calling you all morning, you know. Calling and texting, just constantly, almost. How come you didn’t answer? You didn’t even have to say anything. I woulda been here. I just…” Mac trails off.

Dennis stares in silence at the thin red lines of the lettering on Mac’s t-shirt. He examines the slants and straight lines, the serif on the letters.

“I gotta be honest, man; I still don’t get why you do this shit. I wish you wouldn’t. I really wish you wouldn’t. Like, just text me, dude — _911,_ or a skull and crossbones emoji, or something. Anything, really. It’s like…” Mac huffs out a sigh, and runs a hand through his hair. “I dunno. I figure… people hurt you enough in your life; you really don’t gotta make yourself hurt any more, right?”

Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong, but Dennis doesn’t know how to say that. Instead, he scowls, suddenly finding within himself the strength to push himself up off the floor. He washes the dried blood off his hands and stumbles out into his bedroom, ignoring Mac’s questions and protests.

As he slumps face down onto his comforter, Dennis is faintly aware of water running in the bathroom, and cabinets opening and closing. Mac putters around in there for a while, like he’s cleaning up everything.

“You coming into work today?” Mac’s voice is nearby, still uncharacteristically quiet and calm. “It might be good for you, to get out of the apartment.”

Dennis peeks up to find Mac standing beside his bed, and shakes his head.

“Alright. I’m gonna—I’ll be out in the living room if you need anything, okay? Unless you want me to stay,” he asks, a hint of what might be hope creeping into his nervous voice.

It feels too shameful to admit aloud, but Dennis occasionally finds himself wishing he were thirteen years old again, back when he was still small enough to fit safely in his mother’s arms. (Not that she was ever generous in doling out physical displays of affection. Far from it.) But, more than anything, he wishes he were still naïve enough to believe in the possibility of physical intimacy without the expectation of sex. At times, it’s like a deep ache in the center of his chest — the wanting, the yearning.

But maybe that kind of closeness isn’t so much a realistic possibility as it is an ideal that sad, lonely, delusional people strive for. Much like Heaven, or unconditional love, or world peace: concepts that sound nice in theory, but will never materialize in reality.

So sometimes Dennis doesn’t want to be touched.

He shakes his head again.

“Alright. Feel better, Den,” Mac murmurs.

He closes the door to Dennis’s room behind him, leaving it open just a crack.

**Author's Note:**

> Maybe someday I will be able to write fewer depressing things.
> 
> I wrote this last night while listening to "Oh, Sister," a Bob Dylan song, as covered by Fiona Apple and Andrew Bird. It came across my tumblr dashboard while I was working on this. The phrase "time is an ocean" (in the title) is taken from the song lyrics. I feel like it's an accurate (if vague) explanation of getting lost in time, that "fragmented and disconnected autobiographical narrative" that comes as a result of trauma. (tbh I almost went with "am I not a brother to you? and one deserving of affection?" which is also part of the song lyrics.) Anyway, here's the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwZ7fwVcQJc (do links even work on here? I have no idea!!)


End file.
